H.E. Guðni Bragason, the Ambassador of Iceland to India:
Sustainability and renewable energy are important themes in Icelandic-Indian discussion. We appreciate the government’s dedication to fighting global warming and the pledge for India to become carbon neutral. We have also noted the policy to increase the share of renewable energy and that it should be the half of the energy used. These are ambitious plans and call for more investments and, also, thermal energy. That is where we come into picture.
Iceland has the longest experience in geo-thermal energy. We are co-operating with India on developing this energy and we are ready to share the expertise and technical know-how. In Copenhagen, a task force was agreed upon to identify pilot projects on geo-thermal energy and we have started operations for that.
We have a project with ONGC in Ladakh in producing electricity and this will be renewable energy production 24×7. The utilisation doesn’t need to be on the industrial scale but on the small domestic level as well. Another project in Himachal Pradesh strengthens the security and livelihood of fruit-producing farmers. These projects do not need official reports from us, and they could be approached for any business-to-business venture; we are a free-market economy.
Our agency Business Iceland focusses on six areas – thermal, innovation and new technology, creative arts and culture, tourism and travel, fisheries, and specialised products. Innovation is very important in this respect and both our countries have strong technical infrastructure, research and development institutions and, first and foremost, people with ideas. Innovation is essential for both our societies. At high-level meetings, there have also been discussions of innovative solutions of carbon utilisation and storage. We have introduced the potential new methods in this that would enable us to store in a rock. This rock formation is to be found in some parts of India and might be interesting to businesspeople in those parts of the country.
We also have a company which is exploring collaborations in turning carbon-dioxide to methanol fuel. This technology can have huge applications in India’s industries. So, ideas like these can help achieve India’s target of carbon neutrality.
APARNA PIRAMAL – chemical khichdi – how I hacked my mental health.
Tara Deshpande – congratulation on the book. It is candid, insightful but most important of all, it is a hopeful book. Reading it, there are so many great hacks for everyday life. it is a must read for anybody and everybody.
So, what is bipolar disorder? How is it different from depression and other kind of mental disorders?
I have lived with bipolar disorder for 22 years; it first happened to me in my 20s. I was about to go to Harvard and there was a lot going on in my professional and personal life. My parents were surprised to see the way I was changing before their very eyes and none of us could understand what was going on. I had so many thoughts in my head, I couldn’t sleep. I had lots of energy, I had plans of wanting to change the world and it was not clear whether this was a personality change, or was this happening because of trouble in my parents’ marriage, or was it the excitement of going to Harvard? There were certain triggers, obviously, but it was only later that we found out that there are certain psychological triggers that cause chemical balances. As the name suggests there are two aspects to bipolar disorder, one of being very high which is called mania and then there is an aspect of being low which we all know as depression.
Typical symptoms of mania are decreased need for sleep, feeling energetic despite less sleep than usual, increased or faster speech, uncontrollable racing of thoughts or quickly changing ideas and thoughts while speaking, distractibility, restlessness, risky behaviour and some of us maybe had gone all through this when working on a deal or project and we have experienced these ideas ourselves but when it goes on for too long and becomes extreme is what happens in the disorder.
People like Manjeet have seen me in my extremely productive and creative state and, also, in losing control over myself. Typically, then, these ideas then come to crash and then you hit this whole phase of depression, sadness lasting most of the days or nearly every day, great loss of interest or pleasure in almost all activities that you once enjoyed, sudden change of appetite, insomnia, restlessness, feeling worthless of self, guilty, frequent thoughts of death, trouble in making decisions. So, again these are things that have happened to me. This is the outline of the extremes. It doesn’t happen all the time. But it takes time to deal with it before and after, and that can take away a big chunk of your year and result in lost time, potential and productivity. That is why I wrote the book, to help people deal with their mental health.
You said it started about 20 years ago. That was the first time we met in Boston, and I had no idea. I thought it was hard enough for me, having no friends, lonely, dealing with the city. I can’t imagine how much harder it must have been for you. how did you cope?
I had to teach myself to enjoy my own company even though I had friends. I remember a weekend when all my friends had gone out, we were sharing a house and I had a knife in my hand and I said, it is going to take too long if I cut myself. So, instead of taking my life, I found a book on my bookshelf that I really enjoyed. I remember telling my friend that it was the worst weekend of my life but ended up being the best because I found a book I enjoyed. So, I didn’t enjoy Harvard Business School that much, but I had a good group of friends, we travelled a lot, and I also enjoyed my own company whether it was going for a yoga or creative writing class outside the campus. So, you have to start looking inward to find joy, you can’t depend on the outside world.
In his writings on psychotherapy, Freud has stated that melancholia is generally a traumatic event or continuous period of trauma that triggers these chemical imbalances. Did you experience such incidences? Do you feel that if you hadn’t, bipolar disorder may have not come into your life?
Bipolar is genetic and hereditary, from what I understand. This is not to say that my children will necessarily be, too; the chances are higher but a lower percentage overall. But once it gets triggered, it is difficult to stop. There were triggers in my personal and professional life in the early 20s, and it is hard to say if those triggers wouldn’t have happened something else would have happened, that is a bit speculative. A better way to look at it is how you develop the resilience that you need to cope with triggers so that there are fewer episodes. It is how you increase the distance between them. The last time I was manic was about four years ago. Can I go five years and more without being manic? That is the way I look at it.
On page 237, you list simple, clear techniques to cope with the triggers and circumnavigate them. Will you share some with us?
It’s a list for anyone with a mental health condition. So, talking to somebody is important. The hardest part is telling people that you have a vulnerability and telling them how you feel. You may not feel like telling a therapist directly, but you can talk to someone close and, over time, if you are ready to talk to a professional, that is important. Listening to your body is important, getting sleep and nutrition and exercise are linked to any mental health condition. Joy, for me, is table tennis with my kids. It is the most fun thing we do in the week. Connecting with nature is important. Journaling, being honest and regular; you don’t have to write every day, every few days is okay, when you feel upset or unhappy or happy. It can be an amazing record of what you have gone through over time. So, these are simple hacks and there are whole sets of resources towards the end of the book which are of people, organisations, and apps to help.
You talked about bipolar being genetic, so, how did you explain this to your children? Did you discuss it with them? And I know Amith has an interesting metaphor in your book, would be great if you can narrate it to the audience.
My husband thinks of me as a volatile stock, so, he is really into stock market investing now. He was looking at a video of Warren Buffet which said that volatility on its own is not a measure of riskiness, just because a stock is volatile doesn’t mean the stock is inherently risky. There might be other reasons why it is risky but not because of volatile. So, he says, just because I am volatile doesn’t mean I am a risky asset.
The kids are fully aware of what is going on; as long as I am fine they don’t really care. The younger one doesn’t remember a lot of my mood swings because he was quite young; the older one is 14 and very empathetic. He is the first person to detect my mood swings even more than Amith. So, you can’t hide anything from them. We are open about it. For this book, I interviewed the older one, and he gave a beautiful interview which showed his lack of judgment as well as his maturity. So, I think they are quite adaptive. Once, they had asked what if it happens to them? But I explained the probability of the genetics and what we need to teach our kids is to be resilient. Nowadays, we want to make the lives of our children as easy as possible, give all conveniences but we also have to teach them that failures will happen and you will have to get up and recover from the failures and be resilient.
You come from a well-known corporate family; when you decided to write the book, did you take counsel from your family? Did they give you the perils of exposing vulnerabilities like this? Has there been any negative backlash?
So, far none. I think it is very well-received. People are liking the honesty, I think they were worried whether I would be able to manage the writing because you have to relive everything that you have gone through. I interviewed 60-70 people, so, 60-70 times I had to ask them what their experience was when I was manic. You must prepare for some pretty brutal and honest answers. They were not worried about disclosure. There were some very raw pieces of writing that I was frankly surprised when I said I want to publish this, they didn’t have any issue about that. So, they were open about it. The ones who said I shouldn’t write, I ignored them.
So, am I right in understanding that it was a cathartic experience? Did you write it for yourself or to help other people?
The poetry and the journal in the book are very cathartic. It gave me purpose during the lockdown, something to do. Before that I was doing workshops and travelling, the previous year I was all over the world, and, in 2020, I had time to sit by myself and write it. I wanted to do it for myself but I was always pretty sure that it would be helpful to a lot of people. I always thought women would empathise more because it is a woman’s story but I am surprised how it is resonating with a lot of men from all age groups. It is really something as much for men as for women.
In the book you also write that privilege and affluence is sort of buffer of the mockery you face when you write a book that talks about yourself in such depth, now not everyone has that. So, what happens to the average person in their work place when sometimes this discrimination comes because of sheer ignorance, sometimes for other more negative reasons. What advice would you give them?
I hope it becomes a little bit easier to have that conversation. I was at a conference in Coimbatore and one of the speakers came up to me afterwards and said he was bipolar and he had not told anyone at work. I said, maybe this book makes that conversation easier. I think the conversations that really change things for me are the ones that actually worked. They made it easier for me to be candid about my work and condition because my friends, family and doctors knew about it anyway. It was the work colleagues who didn’t and finally when I told them, things became easier.
The treatment of bipolar has been a combination of different kind of therapies and drug therapy, so, was your family nervous or sceptical about it?
I did not take medicines for 13 years and there was a question of whether or not I was bipolar. We were going to a therapist who was not very keen on labelling bipolar so, we didn’t take medication and then it reached a stage where I was really psychotic and I had to take medicine to tranquilise and stabilise. So, there was a stage where we could not avoid the psychiatrist clinic anymore and we had to go there. That is one of the reasons I wrote the book because 20 years ago I didn’t know of this. So, if a 20-year-old picks this up, or a parent they would know what to tell their child.
In India, psychotherapies and other therapies are not covered by insurance and they can be very expensive, so, it is not accessible to everyone. In your book, one of the things I found really fabulous is all the different resources that you have listed from rural to the work places in the country. Can you tell us about some resources that are available less expensively?
There are lots of organisations doing this work. Talk to Me is one I am associated with; it provides free or highly subsidised therapy for people who otherwise would have never accessed it. Everyone from juvenile delinquents to women in shelter homes to middle class or lower middle-class students to police officers, they are counselling them. There is another organisation called Aatmiyata in Gujarat doing work for rural communities and they have their own model. The book has many examples.
How can the competitive and stressful corporate world make it easier for people and make sure that despite their conditions they can be really productive and never feel side-lined?
The corporate world is going through so much change due to covid; people don’t want to come back to the work place, they want to work for themselves, they don’t want to commute. So, it is a good time to have these conversations. What worked for me was, the organisation realised what was a fit between what was I capable of doing, where was I best suited to contribute and what was suitable for the organisation.
It didn’t make sense to have me as a part of news team which would have a lot of deadlines and daily stresses, file copy at a certain frequency, but it made more sense to have me on features where there is more flexibility. So, I take on projects keeping that in mind. I do things on a monthly basis, and if I have time on my calendar then I take more. So, it is about adjusting the bandwidth of the person having the condition and fitting that to accommodate what suits the organisation. If there is a good fit, it can be for a long time. I have been writing for The Mint for 14 years and teaching in a university in Gujarat for about five years.
Besides medication and counselling, you draw from Indian philosophy, spirituality, and yoga techniques. How has that helped you?
It is not so much about religion but mindfulness, emotional detachment, and attachment, understanding things like gratitude and purpose or dharma. There is a sholka from The Gita which changed my life. What spirituality has done is allowed me to have a conversation with myself about what I want in life. What are success and happiness for me, what is fulfilment and what are those things we all want. We all reach at a stage where we have everything but we still want to feel happier and purposeful. The spiritual approach has helped me discuss these issues with myself because these are all triggers for mental health conditions.
You draw many connections, sociological, statistical between various events and mental health: increasing rates of suicide among housewives, vicious circle of unemployment in men leading to depression and then further unemployment which creates a picture of how important mental health awareness is. Tell us more about it.
You can’t look at mental health as just genetics and chemical imbalance. These societal problems affect all of us and mental health problems are more common than cancer but we are not ready to talk about them in a same way. The connection to mind, body and soul are so related. When I speak to psychotherapists, they tell me that today if you go to gastro person repeatedly, he is going to prescribe you anti-anxiety medicines because he knows you are not going to go to the psychiatrist. Without knowing, you are taking the medication anyways. So, there is a direct link between the physical and mental health and which is why looking mental health as overall care package makes sense.
